Lindsay Lohan as Liz Taylor: As bad as we feared

LOW EXPECTATIONS MET

No one expected her to be anything but awful. And we were not disappointed.

One can understand, I guess, the ironic stunt-casting of Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor in the Lifetime biopic Liz & Dick. Understand, but not condone. What Lifetime gained in pre-show publicity they lost in any remaining shred of credibility.

On the other hand, they pretty much guaranteed themselves massive tune-in numbers out of sheer morbid curiosity to see how bad she’d screw it up. It’ll be interesting to see how many of those people managed to stick with it to the end. There is only so long you can look at a traffic accident before the tragedy starts to sink in.

It’s not just Lohan, who somehow exceeds even our incredibly low expectations. There is a script here that appears to have been written in crayon, by Christopher Monger — incredibly, the same man who penned the Emmy-winning HBO film Temple Grandin.

It starts in 1961, at a Hollywood party, where Richard Burton first lays eyes on Taylor. Burton is actually quite well played by Grant Bowler, who impressively evokes that familiar, broody Shakespearean voice. He looks just a little like Burton ... but mostly like Aaron Eckhart.

Lohan in no way looks like Taylor. Nor does she sound like Taylor. She looks and sounds like Lindsay Lohan, playing dress-up in her mother’s ‘60s castoffs, too much makeup and a series of increasingly unrealistic wigs.

Burton begins with a voice-over narration, which we see is a letter he’s writing 23 years later, at his home in Switzerland. He tells the maid, “I’m going to lie down.” It is painfully apparent that he is not going to get up again.

Instead, we get a framing narrative sequence that reunites the couple, apparently post-mortem, in their prime and all dressed in black. It is a ridiculous conceit meant to compensate for the holes in the storytelling. This is a true story! How can there be holes in the storytelling? It actually happened!

It can’t have happened like this. Taylor and Burton were, in life and on film, over-the-top dramatic. But this is ridiculous.

They meet again on the Italian set of Cleopatra, the ill-fated 1963 epic and their first co-starring film. They immediately rub each other the wrong way, this in spite of Burton’s facetious wooing of her as “a beautiful woman with the depths of the ocean in your violet eyes and the promise of a ripe plum in your soft firm lips and your spilling white hit bosom ...”

This is over dinner. Even the famously vain Taylor almost gags on her fois gras.

But then Burton is clearly drunk, and so hung over on set the next morning he can barely croak out his lines. Taylor invites him to her trailer for a restorative cocktail. He makes a half-hearted pass. She kicks him out.

That night we meet their respective spouses, Sybil Burton and Eddie Fisher. The next day is Cleopatra and Marc Antony’s big love scene. Predictably, it quickly gets out of control, and they start to rub each other the right way.

Burton and Taylor go running back to her trailer. And then his. And then hers. And then his ... the spouses are diverted by crew members, and are thus the only people in Italy who do not know that Taylor and Burton are getting it on.

Sybil flips out, though this is far from the first time Burton has strayed. Eddie is in denial, at least until Burton confronts him in public and forces Taylor to decide.

They set up house in an Italian villa. The paparazzi follow them. Taylor flashes her bum. Burton takes her out to buy her some jewelry, the first of the countless expensive trinkets he showered upon her during their tempestuous relationship. The paparazzi follow.

Sybil tries to commit suicide, and when Burton is guilted into coming home to his family, Taylor tries to commit suicide too. The guy can’t catch a break. “My heart is broken and you have the smashed pieces,” he tells her. No wonder she tried to kill herself.

Taylor retreats into seclusion in Switzerland, but Burton soon follows. He has a new film, The V.I.P.s, slated to co-star Sophia Loren, in which he gets to “sit around and look gloomy and drink like a fish.” Method acting. Taylor wangles the Loren role. The affair is back on.

They fight. They make up. He buys her jewelry. She buys him a Van Gogh. They finally get their respective divorces, only to find themselves social pariahs. Even the Pope is on their case. Religious zealots protest in front of the New York theatre where Burton is rehearsing Hamlet. One placard reads “Slut on a Hot Tin Roof.”

And the paparazzi follow.

It’s now 1964, and they run off to Montreal to get married. Then very quickly it’s 1966, and Burton is losing his first Oscar nomination to Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou. The next year both Taylor and Burton are nominated for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Taylor wins, Burton doesn’t. Now he’s drinking straight out of the bottle.

And the paparazzi follow.

The rest of it is a blur, as indeed it must have been to them at the time. It’s as if screenwriter Monger realized that he was running out of time and had to cram the rest of story into the last 15 pages.

Burton buys more jewelry. And a plane. And throws Taylor a lavish 40th birthday party. They live on a yacht moored in Portofino. And then they wonder why they’re broke.

They fight. They make up. Burton takes a job just for the money in the pirate movie Bluebeard. Mourning the death of his brother, he binges on booze and apparently affairs with other women. He is linked with Nathalie Delon. She is linked with Aristotle Onassis.

Liz & Dick was ostensibly Lohan’s comeback vehicle. And again, like every other vehicle she’s ever driven, she manages to total it. But this will not be the last we hear of her, not by a long shot. Not if the paparazzi have anything to say about it.